TL;DR
- The draft Bill is real and overdue — but it’s built to catch only the most serious cases.
- There is no explicit religious exemption and no “consenting adults” clause — but the high threshold does much of the work an exemption would have done.
- The draft sets no special rule for children: a child’s case must clear the same high bar as an adult’s.
- Most conversion practice is slow, sustained pressure, not a single, readily provable serious-harm event — which is exactly what the threshold may struggle to reach.
The last piece set out what the draft Conversion Practices Bill does, and much of it is strong. But a law is defined as much by what it leaves out as by what it covers, and this one has three silences worth naming plainly.
Where the Bill goes quiet
On consent: the draft doesn’t say consent is a defence, and it doesn’t say it isn’t. It simply leaves the question open. Survivors who were pressured into “agreeing” to practices know how hollow that consent can be, and the Bill’s silence leaves room to argue the point both ways. Whether consent could ever be relevant would, in the end, be for the courts to resolve, not commentators.
On children: there is no special rule. A child subjected to a conversion practice has to clear the same “abusive and seriously harmful” threshold as an adult. Other protections and child-safeguarding law still reach many of these cases — but the criminal offence itself does not treat a practice aimed at a child as wrong in and of itself. It should.
On the threshold itself: “serious harm” is a high bar, and most conversion practice does not take the form of a single, readily provable, serious-harm event. It looks more like a slow, sustained environment of pressure. The same point applies to religious settings — there’s no explicit exemption, but a practice in a faith context is only caught if it independently clears the abusive-and-seriously-harmful bar. Campaigners who have long said the majority of practices happen in religious settings reasonably ask whether the everyday, non-violent forms will ever meet it.
The pattern across all three is the same. The threshold has been set high enough to reassure the faith and clinical lobbies that ordinary belief, prayer and legitimate practice stay legal — and the cost of setting it there is everything that slips underneath: the quiet, sustained, non-violent pressure that makes up most of the harm.
A law that names the problem
Conversion practice is rarely one act you can point to in a courtroom. It is an environment. It is the repeated, patient message that who you are is a defect to be corrected — often delivered through love rather than cruelty, which is precisely what makes it so hard to recognise, and so hard to prove. A threshold of “serious harm” measures the bruise. It does not measure the mechanism.
These practices were never therapy. There is no credible evidence that a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity can be safely or effectively changed by them, and the UK’s leading health and counselling bodies rejected them years ago as unethical and harmful. Calling them “therapy” was always the lie that let them continue. A law worth its name should start from that fact: it should protect against the ordinary forms, not only the spectacular ones; it should treat a practice aimed at a child as categorically wrong; and it should not let “serious enough” become the gate that decides whose suffering counts.
This draft is a real and overdue step, and that deserves to be said plainly. But a draft is not a law, and a high threshold is a choice, not a fact of nature. The scrutiny ahead is where it’s decided whether this becomes a ban that names the problem honestly — or one that reaches only the worst of it and leaves the rest to continue.
Sources
- Draft Conversion Practices Bill, GOV.UK, 25 June 2026 (Bill text).
- Draft Conversion Practices Bill: Explanatory Notes, GOV.UK, 25 June 2026.
- Memorandum of Understanding on Conversion Therapy in the UK (2017).
